It's 42 tankoban long and probably still my favorite manga. Ever. Its strength comes from the fact that much of the emotional story behind everything is told through dense and subtle visuals, rather than exposition and symbolism as in most manga nowadays. For example, there's places where the reader sees one facial expression and one panel, which details an emotional reaction that would probably be stretched out for pages and pages in a manga... despite Toriyama having revealed that he never ever plans ahead, there's a lot of difficult and rare emotional situations that I felt were handled with surprising realism. That, and it has a wonderfully surreal sense of humor. And the smartest person in the entire strip is a woman, which was a really nice surprise coming from that era.
Unfortunately, most of the charm is untranslatable into English. All the same, it's my most highly recommended manga.
Also, someone rec'd Revolutionary Girl Utena (or something) to me.
I have no idea what the hell it is.
Anyone here watch it? Is it watchable or should I just skip it?
I'd prefer the opinion of a person who I know (at least on the internets.)
SKU (Shoujo Kakumei Utena) is famous for basically being the Evangelion of the slice-of-life school manga. It has a bunch of convoluted love plots, an all-powerful and extremely good-looking school council, roses everywhere, bizarre school uniforms... and bucketloads of angst, symbolism, and horrible things happening all over the place.
Frankly, I preferred Evangelion, but I have to admit the genius of Utena. I'm hoping to go back and watch it someday--due to some friend politics I was unable to make myself go through it, but essay after essay has been written on it as a study on adolescence and psychology. For something so poorly known it's a very important work.